


this strange estrangement

by sonlali



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Closure, F/M, M/M, Moving On, conversations with an ex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21601855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonlali/pseuds/sonlali
Summary: Based on the prompt "I just really miss talking to you."Patrick and Rachel have a long-overdue conversation.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Patrick Brewer/Rachel
Comments: 24
Kudos: 98





	this strange estrangement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nervouscupcakeinspace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nervouscupcakeinspace/gifts).



> [cupcake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nervouscupcakeinspace): thanks for this prompt (from many, many weeks ago). i really enjoyed writing it! i hope you enjoy! <3
> 
> title from "Going Through the Motions" from the episode "Once More, With Feeling" from _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. look, i was listening to the soundtrack while writing, and i liked the line. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Rachel is struggling to unlock her door without dropping her groceries when she hears her phone start ringing in her purse. It’s barely 8 a.m. on a Sunday, and she can’t imagine who would be calling her. She’s about to ignore it when suddenly she recognizes the ringtone. She has only assigned specific ringtones to a few contacts—her parents, her sister, her best friend, and—”Patrick,” she gasps, dropping her keys to the ground. 

It’s been so long since she’s heard that ringtone that she questions whether she’s hearing correctly. But no, she’d recognize that anywhere. They slow danced to this song at the winter formal when they were 16. 

Before she can get too lost in her memories, Rachel reaches into her purse to grab her phone. She loses her grip on one of the grocery bags and it drops to the ground next to her keys. She manages to reach the phone just before the call goes to voicemail.

“Patrick?” she asks, half thinking (perhaps half hoping) that he will have already hung up. 

“Rach?” his voice is soft, gentle, and so painfully familiar. He’s silent for a long moment, almost as if he wasn’t expecting her to answer. Or maybe he’s regretting calling. Rachel watches as an apple rolls away from her fallen groceries. She hears him clear his throat, take a deep breath, and then clear his throat again. “You still there?” he finally asks.

“Yeah,” she huffs a rueful laugh. They’ve known each other since they were 14. They’ve spoken for hours on end before. They’ve stayed up all night talking on several occasions. And now they can barely say two words. She’s about to ask him why he’s calling when he speaks again.

“I just… um… how are you?” His voice is shaky and she feels both sympathetic and angry. _Why_ is he calling after all this time? Why is he calling and then acting like he’s too uncomfortable to speak? Does he expect her to comfort him? 

“Patrick, what do you want?” Her arms are aching from holding the groceries for so long, so she stoops to try to retrieve her keys without spilling anything else. She regrets the callous note in her voice, but she really doesn’t want to deal with this right now, to deal with him right now. 

“I… um… right, I probably shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry, Rach. I just… I just really miss talking to you.” Patrick is stuttering and he sounds almost as if he is on the verge of tears, and Rachel drops the remaining bags of food. She faintly registers that Patrick is still speaking on the other end of the phone, but she can’t focus on his words. 

Rachel stands there, outside her apartment building, surrounded by the contents of her reusable shopping bags—she realizes with a start that she bought these bags with Patrick at a farmer’s market they visited with Clint and Marcy—and a sob wracks through her body. She drops to the ground next to a box of cereal and a now-dented can of soup and cries silently. She refuses to let Patrick hear her crying. She has shed too many tears for him. If he finally wants to talk to her, she is going to do this with dry eyes and a steady voice. 

“Should I hang up?” Patrick asks hesitantly. Rachel wipes her eyes and takes a deep breath to compose herself. She can do this. She can handle this.

“No, no, that’s okay. We… we can talk if you want.” Rachel is proud of how unaffected she sounds. “What did you want to talk about, Patrick?”

“I just miss you, Rach. I… I really fucked up with you. I… you… you were my best friend. We were together for 15 years. I talked to you nearly every day, and then suddenly, you were gone from my life.” 

Rachel scoffs loudly at that and starts to interrupt, but Patrick keeps going.

“I know. I know that I’m the reason you were gone. Or I guess, the reason I was gone. Rachel, I had to leave. Our relationship wasn’t good for either of us. But I never wanted to leave _you_.”

“What does that even mean?” Rachel asks. It’s been ten months since Patrick left. Nearly four months since she last saw him on that awful day in Schitt’s Creek. She can’t figure out why he is calling now. She wished for months that he would talk to her and that he would explain why he left. Then she found out why, and she wished he would just _talk_ to her. But he didn’t. Patrick never called. He never returned her messages. Now here he is calling, and Rachel isn’t sure she wants to hear what he has to say. 

“I mean that I miss you. I miss talking to you. I never wanted to cut off ties entirely, but it was the only way I could think to end things for real. I needed to start over so I could figure myself out, and I guess I just wanted to keep my old life separate from who I am now.” Patrick sounds so painfully sincere, like he doesn’t even realize how cruel his words are. Rachel is angry now.

“Oh, I see, it was the _only_ way you could end things.” Rachel tries to convey as much sarcasm as possible in her voice. She wants her words to bite. “The only way you could end our relationship was driving hundreds of miles away and refusing to answer any calls or texts or give any explanation as to why you didn’t want to be with me. But it’s okay, because you _missed_ me. You missed me so much that you cut me clean out of your life!”

“You’re right,” Patrick says after a long pause. “I was an ass, and I did everything wrong. You deserved so much better, Rach. You deserved better when we were together, you deserved better after I left, and you deserve better now. I owe you a proper conversation.”

Rachel looks up at the sky. It’s the exact same shade of blue as the shirt Patrick was wearing the last time she saw him. She looks back down at the ground and watches as a bird swoops down to investigate the apple she had so carefully selected a half hour ago. She sighs.

“Okay, yes, let’s do this. Let’s talk, Patrick.” Rachel watches the bird peck at the apple and attempt to drag it off before giving up and taking flight again. 

“Rach, what we had was real. Remember when we would stay up all night talking? When I was pissed off at my parents, I would talk to you. When my grandma died, you were there for me. And remember in high school when we made up stories about Mr. Stevens and… what was her name? The French teacher?”

“Ms. Collins,” Rachel whispers.

“Yes! Remember all those ridiculous stories we made up about them when we were bored in class? And that summer when we would pick out the worst movie we could think of and try to sit through it and then end up laughing for hours.”

“God, yes, and at the end of each month we declared a winner to whoever chose the worst movie.” Rachel can’t help but laugh at the memory. 

“We spent so much time at the… at the—” Patrick cuts himself off with a muttered “Fuck.”

“At the Rose Video,” Rachel finishes. “We went there at least once a week when we were 16. And then you applied for a job because then we could check out the videos for free.”

“Rachel—” Patrick starts, but Rachel interrupts.

“No, Patrick. No. We’re not going to sit here and just reminisce about when we were teenagers! We were together for 15 years. We need to talk about the real shit. Talk to me about David. Tell me how you… how you knew you didn’t love me.” Now there’s a squirrel nibbling at the apple, trying to break through the peel, and Rachel wants to scream.

“Right, you’re right. Um… okay, yeah, we can do that.” Rachel can hear Patrick closing himself off the same way he has for years. Whenever Patrick doesn’t want to discuss something, all the walls start coming up. She wonders how much she’ll be able to get out of him before he completely shuts her out and ends the call. So many phone conversations between them have ended that way during all of their “off-again” periods. 

“Was it always wrong, Patrick? Did we… did _I_ always feel wrong?” Rachel forces herself to ask the question.

“No!” The answer comes too quickly, too loud and unnatural, and Rachel feels like she has her answer. “No, you weren’t wrong. I… I didn’t know, Rachel. I promise. I promise I wasn’t forcing myself in the closet or something like that. I really didn’t know what it all was supposed to feel like. I didn’t know it wasn’t right with us.” 

It’s the most honest he’s ever been with her. Rachel can hear it in his voice and knows that this is Patrick without his walls up. He’s finally being real with her, and she feels a pang of sympathy. She can’t imagine how he must have felt all those years. She can’t imagine the confusion and the pain. 

“But it _was_ wrong, Patrick,” she says softly. “We were wrong, and even though you didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like, you _did_ know it wasn’t right with us. You did.”

He hesitates, and when he speaks, she can hear the emotion in his voice. “I… I did. I knew something wasn’t right. I’m so sorry, Rach. I tried so hard, and I didn’t know how to make it right. I’m so sorry.” 

He’s trying to disguise it, but she can tell that he’s crying now. Rachel’s heart aches. She wants so badly to be there for him, to hold him and wipe his tears away, to tell him it’s okay. She’s still angry and hurt, but right now she’s just terribly sad for Patrick. 

“I’m sorry, P. I’m sorry you didn’t know for so long.” 

“No!” His voice is loud and clear again. “No, Rach. Don’t apologize. This is on me. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I shouldn’t have strung you along for so long. It wasn’t fair to you when we kept getting back together even though I could feel that something wasn’t right.”

“No, that’s not… that’s not what you owe me an apology for.” The squirrel has managed to break off a chunk of the apple and is now scurrying away with its mouthful. Rachel watches for several seconds and counts her breaths. “Patrick, I’m sad that you spent so many years feeling so confused and unhappy, but that is… that isn’t about me. You don’t owe me an explanation for your sexuality. No, what I’m upset about is the way you just completely cut me out of your life.”

Patrick sniffs noisily, but he doesn’t speak, so Rachel continues.

“You just _left_. We’d broken up and gotten back together so many times, but you had never left. And I didn’t even know where you went. You wouldn’t answer my texts, and you were barely even talking to your parents. I was so worried and so confused. And yeah, it was a bad call to surprise you in Schitt’s Creek, but you just completely shut me out of your life like I never even existed!”

“Rachel…” 

“And you just told me David is your boyfriend, please don’t tell your parents, and that’s it! That’s all, and then you just dismissed me. End of conversation. And now you call me four months later, completely out of the blue, and say you miss talking to me. What the fuck, Patrick?! What do you even want? Can’t you just be straight with me for once?”

“‘Fraid I can’t do that,” Patrick quips. 

Rachel barks out a laugh in surprise, and Patrick chuckles awkwardly in response. That sets Rachel off into a fit of giggles, and Patrick follows until they’re both choking on laughter. Several minutes pass in uncontrollable and slightly hysterical laughter. Rachel thinks of how many times she’s laughed with Patrick. They laughed a lot together. Their ability to make each other laugh was something that always worked well in their relationship. Rachel laughs until tears are streaming down her face. She doesn’t even know if they’re tears from laughter or from sorrow. 

When they finally both manage to calm down and catch their breath, Patrick speaks again. “You’re right, and I’m sorry. I do owe you an apology and an explanation for that. I shouldn’t have cut you out like that. I just wanted to start over and distance myself from my old life.”

“So I’m just a part of the old Patrick’s life? Just something to be kept at a distance?” It hurts to think that this is what she is to Patrick. She’s just a skeleton in his closet that he’d rather keep hidden away.

“I… I… yeah,” Patrick sighs. “Yeah, I just wanted a fresh start, and it’s just too hard to think about my past.”

“Even your parents, Patrick? They miss you.”

“They’ll ask questions. I know they want to know why I left you, why i left everything. I can’t… I’m not ready to tell them. I do miss them. I miss you. I just don’t know how to reconcile those two parts of my life, of myself.” There’s a pleading note in his voice, and Rachel recognizes how important it is to Patrick that she understands what he’s saying. She’s not sure that she does, but she can try. 

“Were you really so miserable that you need to erase your entire past?” Rachel’s voice cracks, but it feels like her heart is cracking.

“No, no, of course I wasn’t miserable, Rachel.” But Rachel knows he’s lying.

“You were, though.” She pauses, but Patrick doesn’t try to disagree. “Patrick. You were miserable.”

“Well, were you happy?” He sounds defensive, and Rachel can hear the walls coming up. 

“Yes, I was happy! I was in love with you!”

“Were you really, Rach? Were you _actually_ happy?” Patrick’s voice is barely above a whisper. 

“Yes… I don't know... No. No, I don’t think I was.” Rachel feels a lump in her throat and tears prick her eyes at this realization. “I wasn’t happy. We weren’t happy, were we?”

“No, we weren’t,” Patrick says. They’re both silent for several long moments. 

“But there were some happy times, right?” Rachel finally chokes out. 

“Of course, Rachel! There were so many happy moments. You always made me laugh, and we have so much in common. You were always there for me when I was sad or stressed or frustrated. Rachel, I loved you. I just couldn’t love you the way you deserved.” 

Rachel stares at the apple, its exposed flesh starting to turn brown in the sunlight. She thinks back on the years she spent with Patrick. She thinks of the laughter, the movie nights, the baseball games. Then she thinks about the arguments, the break ups, the tears. She thinks of all the times that she has been hurt, confused, and infuriated by Patrick, and she knows that he’s right. They were never truly happy together as a couple, but they did have a good friendship and Rachel refuses to let that friendship be extinguished without a fight. She wipes at her eyes and counts to ten slowly before speaking.

“So tell me about David then,” she says, as calmly as she can manage. 

“What?” Patrick sounds incredulous. 

“You said you missed talking to me. Let’s talk. Tell me about your boyfriend, please. Not as your ex-girlfriend. Talk to me as your friend, Patrick. I want to know.”

“He’s… he’s incredible, Rach,” Patrick says slowly, almost as if he wants to give her a chance to change her mind. 

Rachel hums to encourage Patrick to keep speaking. At least, she hopes she sounds encouraging. She’s not entirely sure she’s ready to hear the details, but she wants to know. 

“We met when he came to file his incorporation papers for his business. He… isn’t the best at that kind of stuff, so I helped him, and then I suggested that we become partners. In the business, I mean!” Patrick chuckles uncomfortably. 

“Wow,” Rachel exhales heavily. “You always did jump right into things. So how long after you became partners did you start, you know… start dating?”

“Not long. Rachel, are you sure you want to talk about this?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Tell me, Patrick. Please.” It suddenly feels very important that he tells her. 

“It wasn’t long after the store opened. It was our four months when you… when you came to Schitt’s Creek.”

“You celebrate monthiversaries, Patrick? _Shit._ ” Rachel digs around in her purse to find a tissue and blows her nose. “Keep going.”

Patrick hesitates but keeps speaking. “It feels right with him. In a way it never did with us.”

“And you’re happy?” Rachel breathes.

“Yes,” Patrick replies without any hint of hesitation. Rachel remembers all the times Patrick hesitated when they were together. 

“You love him.” It’s not a question because she already knows.

“Yes.”

“I’m happy for you, Patrick. I really mean that. I’m glad you called.” Rachel is surprised when she realizes that she actually means it. 

“Thanks, Rach,” Patrick’s voice is low and relaxed, like he's finally let go of a heavy weight. “I’m really glad too. It’s nice to hear your voice again. Oh, shit! I’ve got to go! I need to get to the store to open it up by 9.”

Rachel can hear him moving around his apartment. She can imagine him grabbing his wallet and keys, maybe a packed lunch. She wonders if he still packs the same lunch every day—turkey sandwich and an apple. There’s a honey bee flying around her apple where it’s still laying on the ground. She hears Patrick’s voice, but it sounds muffled as if he’s holding the phone away from his mouth. 

“Love you, bye!”

Rachel abruptly realizes that David is right there. He’s probably been there all along, perhaps listening to Patrick’s end of the conversation. David’s face pops into her mind. She sees the hurt and confusion that was on his face when he saw her that day in Schitt’s Creek. Next, Patrick’s face fills her mind. She remembers the fear in his eyes when he saw her, like he was looking at a ghost. Embarrassment flushes her face at the memory, but then Patrick’s voice is back on the other end of the phone. She can hear him much more clearly and knows that he’s talking to her again, probably unaware that she could hear him telling David he loves him. 

“Hey, sorry about that,” he says. She can hear a door click shut and the sound of Patrick walking downstairs. 

“Was that David you were talking to?” The words come flying out of her mouth without her permission. 

“Uhh…” Patrick hesitates. “Well, he’s still mostly asleep, but yeah, I was just saying goodbye to him. He usually doesn’t get to the store until around 10:30 or 11.”

Rachel snorts out a laugh. “Wow, so he’s not an early-riser, huh?”

“No,” Patrick is laughing now too. “Not at all. He’s barely human until 10. Some days I have to bribe him with coffee and danishes just to get him to the store before noon.”

Rachel looks at her groceries laying on the ground beside her. She thinks of all the times she and Patrick got up at 7 a.m. to go to the store. She thinks of their morning jogs and drinking their tea together while watching the sunrise. She imagines Patrick with someone who likes to sleep late and likes coffee with danishes and who isn’t punctual. It doesn’t sound like Patrick. 

“He insists that it’s all a part of his _process_ , and if he came to work at 9 it would upset the natural equilibrium, which could have disastrous effects,” Patrick says, and he sounds so damn fond. 

Rachel can hear how much he loves David. She can hear that missing piece of the puzzle that was always absent from their relationship. Maybe this _is_ what Patrick sounds like. It sounds like closure to her. Finally, after so many painful and confusing months, she has the closure she needs to move on.

The sound of Patrick shutting his car door jerks her out of her thoughts. Patrick never likes to talk on the phone while he’s driving, so she knows he’s about to end their call. She feels ready. 

“Okay, I’ve got to head to the store now, so I need to hang up. It’s been really nice talking to you. Really. Thank you, Rachel.” 

“For what?” she asks.

“Just… for everything. Just thank you. Can we talk again sometime?” 

A butterfly lands atop of the apple, and Rachel smiles. “We can talk whenever. Just give me a little time. I’d like for us to rebuild our friendship, but I think it’s going to take some time and a lot of effort for us to get there.”

“Deal. Bye, Rach!” Patrick says.

“Goodbye, Patrick.” Rachel hangs up the phone and looks up at the sky. The sun is peeking out from behind puffy white clouds. It still hurts to think about this chapter of her life officially ending, but a wave of peace washes over her. 

Rachel scoops up her keys and gathers her grocery bags, already making a mental shopping list of the perishables that will need replacing after sitting outside for so long. Just as she is about to fit her key in the lock, she remembers the apple and turns back. Shifting her bags slightly so she can bend down, she grabs the apple and tosses it in the trash bin outside the apartment complex. Now it’s her turn for a fresh start.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on tumblr [@landofsonlali](https://landofsonlali.tumblr.com/)!


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